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Schema markup explained: what still earns rich results in 2026

What structured data is, the JSON-LD most sites use, which rich results Google still shows after three years of removals, what AI search does with it, and the markup on our own site.

By Level UI11 min read

Schema markup is a block of code that tells search engines, in a fixed vocabulary, what a page is about: this is a product that costs €49 and is in stock, this is an article published on this date, this is a business open on these days. Visitors never see it. Search engines read it and can use it to show a richer result: stars, a price, an event date. That promise has changed more in the last three years than in the ten before. Google has stopped showing several kinds of rich result, including the FAQ dropdowns that were on every SEO checklist until May 2026, while AI search engines have become a new reason to add markup. This guide explains what schema markup is, which rich results still exist in October 2026, what the AI systems say about it, and exactly what we publish on our own site.

Schema types and what they still do in Google Search (October 2026)

Schema typeWhat Google can showWho it is forStatus
Product (with Offer)Price, availability, shipping and ratings in results and shopping surfacesOnline shopsShown
Review snippetStar rating under the resultProducts, recipes, software, books, coursesShown, but not for reviews a business publishes about itself
OrganizationLogo and company detailsEvery businessUsed
LocalBusinessAddress, opening hours and contact detailsShops, clinics, officesUsed
ArticleHeadline, image and date in results and DiscoverBlogs, guides, newsUsed
BreadcrumbListSite path instead of the URLSites with sectionsDesktop only since January 2025
EventDate, venue and ticketsVenues, organisersShown
JobPostingA listing in Google’s job searchEmployersShown
VideoObjectThumbnail and key momentsPages built around a videoShown
FAQPageNothing–Not shown since 7 May 2026
HowToNothing–Not shown since September 2023
Course info, Claim review, Estimated salary, Learning video, Special announcement, Vehicle listingNothing–Phased out from June 2025

From Google’s Search Gallery (updated 15 June 2026) and the Search Central changelog. "Used" means Google reads it for that feature, not that a visible enhancement is guaranteed.

What is schema markup?

Schema markup is structured data added to a web page to describe its content in a form machines can read without guessing. A person reading a product page understands that "€49" is the price and "In stock" is the availability. A crawler sees text. Schema markup states the same facts again as labelled data, so there is nothing to guess: this number is the price, in this currency, and this item is available.

The labels come from schema.org, a shared vocabulary launched in 2011 by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, with Yandex joining later that year. In its September 2026 release it defines 826 types, from Product and Event to Dentist and Recipe, and 1,540 properties to describe them. Search engines agreed on one vocabulary so a site could describe itself once and be understood by all of them.

Schema markup, structured data, JSON-LD: one thing, three names

The terms get used interchangeably, and the difference is small. Structured data is the general idea: information organised into labelled fields. Schema.org is the vocabulary that supplies the labels. Schema markup is the code you add to a page to use them. JSON-LD is the format that code is usually written in.

There are three formats, and Google says all three work equally well if the markup is valid: JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa. Google recommends JSON-LD, because it sits in one script block instead of being woven through the page’s HTML, so it can be generated, checked and changed without touching the design. It is also the format the web has moved to: the 2024 Web Almanac found JSON-LD on 41% of pages, up from 34% two years earlier.

What schema markup does for SEO

What schema markup can earn is a richer-looking result, not a better position, and even that is not guaranteed. Google’s own guidelines say it "does not guarantee" that structured data will show up in search results. Markup makes a page eligible for an enhanced result; Google decides whether to show one, page by page and query by query.

When it does, the effect on clicks can be large. Google publishes its own case studies: Rotten Tomatoes measured a 25% higher click-through rate on pages with structured data, Nestlé an 82% higher rate on pages shown as rich results, and Food Network a 35% increase in visits after enabling search features on 80% of its pages. These are the best results Google chose to showcase, not averages, but the direction is consistent: a result with a price, a rating or a date takes more of the reader’s attention than a plain blue link.

Schema also does quieter work. It tells Google which company a site belongs to, which logo to use, which page is a product and which is an article about one. That understanding feeds features without a visible "rich" label, such as the business details in a knowledge panel.

Which rich results still exist in 2026

The list of what schema can win in Google has been shrinking since 2023. In August 2023, Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites, and in September 2023 it stopped showing HowTo rich results altogether. In January 2025, breadcrumbs disappeared from mobile results, which now show only the domain. In June 2025, Google began phasing out seven types it said were rarely used, including Course info, Claim review and Estimated salary. The practice problem type followed in January 2026.

Then, on 7 May 2026, FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search for everyone, and in June 2026 Google removed the documentation. For years, adding FAQ schema was the easiest way to take up more space on a results page. It no longer does anything visible in Google.

What survives is markup that describes something a searcher can act on: a product to buy, an event to attend, a job to apply for, a recipe to cook, a video to watch. Google’s Search Gallery, updated in June 2026, lists 25 features, and the ones most businesses can use are in the table above. Markup Google no longer uses does no harm. Google states that unused structured data causes no problems in Search; it simply has no visible effect there.

Schema markup and AI search

AI search is the new argument for structured data, and the two biggest search companies describe it differently. Google’s documentation for AI Overviews and AI Mode says there is "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" to appear in them, and no new machine-readable files either. It does recommend that structured data match the visible text on the page.

Microsoft has been more direct. At SMX Munich in March 2025, Bing’s Fabrice Canel said schema markup helps Microsoft’s large language models understand content, which is how Bing grounds Copilot’s answers. Whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude use schema when they read a page has not been confirmed by those companies.

Our reading: schema will not make an AI system cite you, but it removes ambiguity about the facts it might cite. A page that states its price, its opening hours and its author in labelled data gives a model one less thing to get wrong. That is the same reasoning behind generative engine optimization, and it is why we treat schema as more useful than an llms.txt file, which no major model has been shown to read.

The schema types most businesses need

Every site benefits from three: Organization, with your name, logo, address and social profiles; WebSite, with your site name; and BreadcrumbList on any page below the home page. They are small, rarely change, and tell search engines and AI systems who is behind every page.

Beyond those, it depends on what you sell. A shop needs Product markup with an Offer on every product page: price, currency, availability and, for sales, a priceValidUntil date that is kept current. An expired one can silently remove your rich result, which is the trap covered in our Black Friday SEO timeline; the rest of the product side is in ecommerce SEO. A local business needs LocalBusiness, or a more specific type such as Dentist or Restaurant, with the same name, address and phone number as its Google Business Profile. A blog or news site needs Article, with the author and dates.

Service businesses have no rich result of their own, and they still benefit from describing their services as Service and Offer: it states plainly what you sell and at what price, which is exactly the kind of fact an AI answer engine might quote.

What it looks like on our own site

Our home page carries a ProfessionalService block with our address, coordinates and opening hours, and an OfferCatalog listing our 13 services, each linked to its page. Every guide, including this one, carries Article markup with its publish and update dates, a BreadcrumbList, and an FAQPage block for the questions at the end. Every package on our price list is described as a Service and Product with an Offer: the price, the currency, and a priceValidUntil date that is always in the future.

We kept the FAQPage markup after Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. It costs nothing, Google says unused markup does no harm, and other systems that read pages, Bing among them, may still use it.

The rule that matters most is that none of it is written by hand. Each block is generated from the same data that renders the visible page, so the price in the markup is the price on the page, and an FAQ answer in the markup is the answer the reader sees, stripped of its formatting. Markup that is copied in separately drifts out of date the first time someone edits the page, and that is the most common way schema goes wrong.

Common schema markup mistakes

Marking up content that is not on the page is the mistake that can cost you most, because Google treats it as spam. Its guidelines say plainly: do not mark up content that is not visible to readers, and a structured data issue can result in a manual action, which removes your rich results until it is fixed. Hidden FAQ answers, ratings that appear nowhere on the page and prices that differ from the visible ones all fall under this.

The second is review stars a business gives itself. Google’s rules say that if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or Organization markup are not eligible for star ratings. Testimonials on your own site are fine to publish, but marking them up to get stars will not work.

The others are quieter. An expired priceValidUntil or a stale price makes product results disappear without an error. Two plugins each adding their own Organization block, with different names or logos, give search engines two conflicting answers. And markup added only by JavaScript in the browser reaches Google, which renders pages, but not most AI crawlers: Vercel’s analysis found that none of the major ones, including GPTBot and ClaudeBot, execute JavaScript, a point we also cover in what AI crawlers send back. Put the markup in the HTML the server sends.

How to add schema markup

On WordPress, an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math adds Organization, WebSite, Article and BreadcrumbList for you, and WooCommerce adds basic Product markup. Most Shopify themes include Product markup out of the box. Check what your platform already outputs before adding more: a second plugin often duplicates what the first one does.

For a single page, a schema markup generator is fine: fill in a form, copy the JSON-LD into the page, test it. For anything that repeats, such as products, articles or locations, generate the markup from the same data as the page, in the template, so the two cannot disagree. That is how a custom-built site should do it, and it is how ours works.

How to test schema markup

Use two tools, because they answer different questions. Google’s Rich Results Test shows which Google features a page is eligible for and flags missing required properties. The Schema Markup Validator, run by schema.org, checks the markup against the full vocabulary, including types Google does not use. After launch, the enhancement reports in Google Search Console show errors across the whole site, and the URL Inspection tool confirms that Google has seen the markup on a given page.

If you want this done properly, our GEO Starter package adds schema.org structured data across up to 15 pages, and a Technical Audit finds markup that is broken, duplicated or out of step with the page. The wider picture is in our SEO services.

Sources

Google’s documentation and changelog were checked on 9 October 2026. The examples from our own site are taken from the live pages on the same day.

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